“Mrs. Nutmeg’s manners are always so much too humble for my liking,” said the divine, “that I presume you allude thus rhetorically to her circumstances.”
“Certainly, my dear Doctor—ex cathedrum, as you would say.”
“I never should, my dear. But let it pass.”
“You know what a thorn in the spirits these goings on of hers have been to me and you will therefore lift up your voice and rejoice, I feel sure, when I tell you that my dear niece has now all the keys in her possession. Margery has found her mistress again.”
The divine laid down his pipe and the benign amusement of his expression gave way to a look of gravity.
“No doubt,” he said, after a pause, “you good ladies know what you are doing. But personally, I should prefer not to retain Mrs. Nutmeg on the premises if it was my business to thwart her.”
But madam, strong in a sense of victory over the dreaded enemy, scouted the suggestion.
“That excellent girl, Ellinor, was actually having the meat weighed and apportioned,” she announced triumphantly, “at the very moment of my arrival this morning. So Mistress Margery’s retail business hath come to an end. A sheep killed every week, Horatio, and pork in the servants’ hall! The woman was an absolute Salomite! How often did I not remind her of Paul’s warning! ‘Serve ye your masters with flesh in fear and trembling.’”
The gentle merriment that Madam Tutterville was happily wont to take as a token of approval in her lord, here shook his goodly form.
“But my voice was as that of the pelican in the wilderness. Well, all her sweet smiles and curtseys this morning would not take me in. She knows her day is over—though she hides her rage.”